On June 25, Prime Minister John Howard announced that the cabinet's National Security Committee had decided to send 1200 troops 200 of them combat soldiers and 300 Australian Federal Police (AFP) officers to the Solomon Islands for at least three months. It will be the largest Australian armed intervention in the South Pacific since World War II.
Since 1998, there has often been violent civil conflict in the Solomon Islands (see page 17). This conflict is, in large part, due to a big rise of youth unemployment resulting from cuts in public spending implemented by the government at the behest of the International Monetary Fund in the wake of the 1997-98 Asian "financial" crisis.
As unemployed young people returned to the countryside, pressure for scarce land led to an explosion of ethnic tensions between Indigenous Guadalcanalan youth and young people of Malaitan descent their ancestors had been brought to Guadalcanal in the early years of the 20th century from the neighbouring island of Malaita to work as plantation labourers.
The conflict led to violent clashes between rival ethnically based militias which disrupted the economy and government services such as health care and education.
Government services and employment collapsed when Canberra cut off nearly all foreign aid, insisting that the Solomon Islands government continue to implement drastic cuts in the public service and social programs.
Howard motivated the decision to send in Australian troops on the grounds that the Solomon Islands was in danger of becoming a "failed state" and that, if Canberra did not act now, this could lead to "challenges in the future of potential exploitation of that situation by international drug dealers, money launderers [and] international terrorism".
Thus Howard justified the Solomon Islands intervention with the same sort of argument he used to justify sending Australian troops to participate in the US-led war on Iraq a hypothetical future threat to Australia's "national security" requires immediate pre-emptive military action.
According to the June 26 Sydney Morning Herald, government officials claim the troop intervention is necessary to back up an AFP operation to "disarm a violent militia hiding in remote jungle" areas of the main island of Guadalcanal.
It is no coincidence that the biggest single Australian business investment in the Solomon Islands the Gold Ridge gold mine is located on Guadalcanal, and has not been operational since June 2000 when it was raided for its vehicles by one of the two main private militia groups on the island.
This points toward the real reasons for Canberra's decision to militarily intervene in the Solomon Islands. They were spelt out in the Australian Strategic Policy Institute's Our Failing Neighbour report, launched on June 10 by foreign minister Alexander Downer: "The collapse of Solomon Islands is depriving Australia of business and investment opportunities that, though not huge, are potentially valuable...
"Australia's interests are also engaged in other ways. In a subtle but important sense, state failure in the Southwest Pacific reflects badly on Australia... Australia's standing in the wider world including with the United States is therefore at stake."
In other words, Australian troops are being sent to the Solomon Islands to protect Australian business interests and to demonstrate to Washington that Canberra can be a reliable deputy sheriff in the South Pacific.
Howard described the intervention into the Solomon Islands as marking "a significant change in Australia's regional policy". In February, a foreign affairs department white paper had ruled out such interventions. "Australia cannot presume to fix the problems of the South Pacific countries", it declared. "Australia is not a neo-colonial power. The island countries are independent sovereign states."
Now, Canberra has decided it will militarily intervene whenever the island states of the South Pacific "fail" to provide a secure environment for the exploitation of their people and natural resources by First World corporations.
Australia's military intervention will do nothing to solve the root cause of the civil conflict in the Solomon Islands. If Canberra really wanted to help the Solomon Islanders, rather than send troops to enable Australian banks and businesses to continue exploiting them, it would provide the necessary financial assistance to enable them to restore public services and eliminate the island's massive unemployment.